Smaranda Gheorghiu

Caricature of Smaranda "Maica Smara" Gheorghiu, published on the cover of Furnica magazine. 1904. Smaranda Gheorghiu born Andronescu (5 October 1857 – 26 January 1944) was a Romanian poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, educator, feminist and traveler. She wrote under a number of pseudonyms and is perhaps best known under the moniker Maica Smara (Mother Smara), which was given to her by Veronica Micle.

An early Romanian feminist, she wrote both fiction and non-fiction with a feminist slant in which she argued against the prevailing views of the time, which held women to be intellectually inferior to men. Smara traveled extensively and recorded her experiences in several volume of travel literature. For her work as a teacher and her efforts to reform the education system, she is sometimes called "Educator of the People".

Biography She was born on 5 October 1857 in the Wallachian city of Târgoviște in a noble family. The daughter of Niţă Andronescu and Alexandrina Vlădescu, she was the oldest of ten children. Niță was a wealthy landowner and one time prefect of the county, while Alexandrina, also of noble stock, was a woman who thoroughly enjoyed traveling and delighting her close ones with stories of European museums. Although the precise relation is disputed, Smaranda was a relative of poet and fabulist Grigore Alexandrescu.

After elementary studies in her hometown, in 1870 she went to high-school in Bucharest, graduating from the Central School for Girls. Soon after finishing high-school she married George Gârbea, a teacher, against her family's wishes. Gârbea encouraged her literary interests and introduced her to some of the cultural paragons of the age, such as Ion Luca Caragiale, George Coşbuc and Alexandru Vlahuţă. It was during this time that she first started publishing poetry.

She left her husband in the early 1880s, when she obtained a teaching position in the town of Sinaia. In 1883 she met Petre Gheorghiu, an army captain and moved with him to Ploiești, where she taught and started contributing to the Şcoala Română magazine. She later moved to Bucharest, where she continued teaching for the rest of her life. By the mid-1880s she was already established in the Bucharest literary scene, with Smaranda hosting some of the most popular gatherings of the cultural elite. Around this time she met Mihai Eminescu and Veronica Micle, who soon became her friends and gave her the nickname Maica Smara, a reference to both motherhood and monasticism.

Her second husband, Petre Gheorghiu died a few years after their marriage, leaving her with two daughters: Zoe and Magadalena, one from each marriage.

In 1888 she published her first book, a volume of poetry called Din pana suferinței (Suffering's Pen). Her next volume was a book of short stories, Novele (1890). In 1892, shortly after the death of her friend, Veronica Micle, she wrote a monograph of Micle, in which she outlined her contributions to the Romantic poetry of Romania. A talk on Micle's legacy held at the Romanian Athenaeum on 13 December 1891 also made her the first woman to lecture there.

Activism and travels Caricature in Furnica showing art collector Ioan Kalinderu welcoming Maica Smara in his incipient Bucharest museum of art. 1910. Particularly after the death of her second husband, Smaranda traveled extensively in Romania, Italy, Belgium, France, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Greece etc., often lecturing on education and women's emancipation.